Laurene Powell Jobs' ad slams Trump on DACA with the words of Ronald Reagan

"And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here."
 By 
Sasha Lekach
 on 

A political advocacy group is going after Donald Trump and his decision to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program on the president's favorite medium: TV.

The California-based Emerson Collective, founded by Laurene Powell Jobs, whose husband was the late Steve Jobs, has purchased ads set to run starting Wednesday, according to Recode.

One of the 30-second ads was released on the group's Vimeo page Tuesday. Using footage of President Ronald Reagan's 1989 speech that referred to a "shining city," the video calls out Trump's decision to end the DACA program for undocumented people who were brought to the U.S. as children.

Reagan in a voiceover says, "And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here."

Powell Jobs has been vocal in fighting the end of DACA.

"Is there anything more heartless and less intelligent that our government could do?" she wrote in a blog post. "It is heartless, because the elimination of this protection will put an end to the upward trajectory, the beautifully American trajectory, of these young people, and destroy their dreams, and force them to live in insecurity and dread."

To supplement her online posts and advocacy work, ads will run for the next week in Denver; Louisville, Kentucky; Raleigh, North Carolina; Las Vegas; and Milwaukee. The media firm GMMB is behind the ad campaign, according to Recode.

Smart move using a Republican icon's own words on TV -- a place likely to get Trump's attention more than anywhere else in the media (except maybe Twitter).

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Sasha Lekach

Sasha is a news writer at Mashable's San Francisco office. She's an SF native who went to UC Davis and later received her master's from the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. She's been reporting out of her hometown over the years at Bay City News (news wire), SFGate (the San Francisco Chronicle website), and even made it out of California to write for the Chicago Tribune. She's been described as a bookworm and a gym rat.

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